Oleg Lola is the founder and chief executive of MobiDev, a software engineering firm with US headquarters in Norcross, Georgia, and engineering offices in Ukraine and Poland. In a 2021 interview with The European Business Review he summed up his view of the field in one line: “AI is not a mystery or magic. It requires input” (European Business Review).
Starting MobiDev in Chernivtsi
Lola founded MobiDev in 2009, and its main engineering office is in Chernivtsi, a city in western Ukraine. The company grew into a full-cycle engineering firm serving small and midsize businesses, and it added machine learning and computer vision work in 2018, according to its own company profile.
Explaining AI to buyers
In the 2021 interview, Lola traced the current wave of AI to AlexNet in 2012 and to Nvidia’s CUDA, which made it possible to train neural networks quickly. He laid out five levels of AI solutions, from ready-made tools like IBM Watson through semi-automatic platforms such as Amazon SageMaker to custom models that need millions of samples.
He was blunt about buyers who come without a plan. “Sometimes, business leaders want AI magic without any clear vision,” he said. In those cases MobiDev starts by working out what data the client has and what the business could gain from it.
Keeping clients close to the work
Lola described MobiDev’s approach as involving clients without overburdening them, with milestones or sprints the client takes part in when the product is still being defined. Our MobiDev review covers how that works on its projects.